SOC-1031

Knowing in Sociology
PART II

Dr Chris Moreh | chris.moreh@newcastle.co.uk | Tutorial Booking

Week 6

Information

Aims

Sociologists are humans
Science and art
An information science
Method is theory is method

Being human

Are we human, or are we denser?
Are we human, or are we dancer?
I guess it bothers people that it’s not grammatically correct, but I think I’m allowed to do whatever I want (Killers’ frontman)
Apparently, alludes to a quote from journalist Hunter S. Thompson about how America is raising a generation of dancers, afraid to take one step out of line (link)
Salsa dancing? (Luker 2008)

Sociology as art

What kind of art?

Literature? Performative? Martial?

Sociology as art

It is my deeply held conviction that the very best social science research of the coming era will be exactly this kind of research—research that draws on the kinds of bold and interdisciplinary insights you can get when you salsa-dance. But be warned: you can’t just show up at a salsa dancing palace and expect to have as much fun as you should without having done at least a little training ahead of time. For all its improvisational nature, salsa dancing builds on some very specific steps (Luker 2008, 2)

Sociology as science

A population science? (Goldthorpe 2016)

Sociology has to be understood as a population science, primarily on account of the degree of variability evident in human social life, at the level of sociocultural entities, but also, and crucially, at the individual level – this latter variability being inadequately treated within the holistic paradigm of inquiry, for long prevalent in sociology but now increasingly called into question (Goldthorpe 2016, 17)

An information science?

Theory as method

A language, indispensable to science
The theoretical language always includes an interpretation of the social reality. We see and understand the world with the help of theories. Theories here serve as an interpretative framework
Theories are indispensable when it comes to explanation, since they conceptualize causal mechanisms
Theories are abstractions; they describe phenomena with reference to certain aspects, which have been separated from other aspects also characterizing concrete events or phenomena
Theories can be of different kinds: metatheories, normative theories, general and more specific descriptive theories

Theorizing

The art of social theory (Swedberg 2014)
Builds on the work of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
The crucial role of guessing in scientific research. It is precisely through guessing that the most important part of the scientific analysis is produced—namely, the explanation.
The term that Charles S. Peirce most often used to refer to the guess of a hypothesis is abduction
Creative theorizing is an abductive-oriented type of theorizing
It’s more like developing the kind of intuitive thinking that experts possess.
Developing it is a question of practice (reading and thinking)

Theorizing

A 3-step process: abduction, deduction and induction
Intensive observation until one is surprised (the surprise comes from finding something that should not be there according to the current state of scientific knowledge)
Come up with an idea for what explains the facts that caused the surprise: abduction (requires to somehow access the less conscious parts of one’s mind)
It must be possible to test this idea empirically; and the test must be successful.
The testing part is called induction by Peirce. This stage is preceded by deduction, during which the researcher tries to deduct hypotheses to test from the original idea or abduction

References

Goldthorpe, John H. 2016. Sociology as a Population Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Luker, Kristin. 2008. Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences: Research in an Age of Info-glut. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Swedberg, Richard. 2014. The Art of Social Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.